Comment Progress

GitHub Action to notify progress by commenting on GitHub issues, pull requests, and commits.

Commenting inspired by GitHub bots like netlify, sonarcloud etc.

Used at Hasura to relay progress of long running GitHub Action workflows on pull requests.

Use case

When deploying preview for a pull request, the GitHub workflow starts by commenting

As the job progresses and if there is a failure at some step, the bot appends the updates about failure in the same comment and fails the GitHub workflow.

If the workflow succeeds, the bot comments the details of the preview environment. (configurable to be a new comment or an update to the previous comment that reported the progress)

Usage

- uses: hasura/[email protected]
  with:
    # The GitHub token to be used when creating/updating comments
    # ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} is provided by default by GitHub actions
    github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

    # The repository to which the pull request or issue belongs to
    # ${{ github.repository }} gives the slug of the repository on which the action is running
    repository: "my-org/my-repo"

    # The pull request or issue number on which the comment should be made
    number: ${{ github.event.number }}

    # The commit sha on which the comment should be made
    commit-sha: ${{ github.sha }}

    # Friendly identifier denoting the context of the comment
    # This id is hidden on the comment made and used for referring the same comment afterwards.
    id: deploy-progress

    # Markdown message to be used for commenting
    message: "Thank you for opening this PR :pray:"

    # Comments on the PR/issue and fails the job
    fail: true

    # Appends the message to a comment that already exits with the given id.
    # If a comment with the given id is not found, a new comment is created
    append: true

    # Deletes all the existing comments matching the given id and
    # creates a new comment with the given message
    recreate: true

    # Deletes all the existing comments matching the given id
    delete: true

Note: The number and commit-sha fields are mutually exclusive. Only one of them should be set in a job. If both or none are present, an error will be thrown and the job will fail.

Note: The append and recreate fields are also mutually exclusive. If none of them are set, the job will continue in normal mode but if both are present an error will be thrown and the job will fail.

Scenarios

• Make a simple comment on an issue or pull request
• Make a simple comment on a commit
• Make a comment and append updates to the same comment
• Delete older/stale comment and add a new comment
• Delete a comment which is no longer relevant

Make a simple comment on an issue or pull request

Making a simple thank you comment via the github-actions user whenever a pull request is opened.

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened]

jobs:
  thank-user:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    name: Say thanks for the PR
    steps:
      - name: comment on the pull request
        uses: hasura/[email protected]
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: "my-org/my-repo"
          number: ${{ github.event.number }}
          id: thank-you-comment
          message: "Thank you for opening this PR :pray:"

Make a simple comment on a commit

This is very similar to commenting on an issue/PR. Here, instead of providing the number field we provide the commit-sha which is the SHA of the commit that we want to comment on.

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  commit-comment:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    name: Comment on commit with some info
    steps:
      - name: Comment on commit
        uses: hasura/[email protected]
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: "my-org/my-repo"
          commit-sha: ${{ github.sha }}
          id: commit-comment
          message: "This is a commit comment :D."

Make a comment and append updates to the same comment

This makes use of the append flag to add the message to the end of an already existing comment that was made with the same id.

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened]

jobs:
  deploy-preview:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    name: Deploy preview
    steps:
      - name: Notify about starting this deployment
        uses: hasura/[email protected]
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: "my-org/my-repo"
          number: ${{ github.event.number }}
          id: deploy-preview
          message: "Starting deployment of this pull request."

      - name: Deploy preview
        run: |
          echo "deploy preview"
          # long running step

      - name: Notify about the result of this deployment
        uses: hasura/[email protected]
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: "my-org/my-repo"
          number: ${{ github.event.number }}
          id: deploy-preview
          message: "Deployment of a preview for this pull request was successful."
          append: true

Delete older/stale comment and add a new comment

Take a case where you need to re-deploy a preview for your pull request and report the status of the redeployment as a new comment and at the same time delete the old comment containing stale information. recreate flag will help in achieving this scenario.

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      number:
        description: "pull request number"
        required: true

jobs:
  deploy-preview:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    name: Deploy preview
    steps:
      - name: Notify about starting this deployment
        uses: hasura/[email protected]
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: "my-org/my-repo"
          number: ${{ github.event.inputs.number }}
          id: deploy-preview
          message: "Starting deployment of this pull request."

      - name: Deploy preview
        run: |
          echo "deploy preview"
          # long running step

      - name: Notify about the result of this deployment
        uses: hasura/[email protected]
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: "my-org/my-repo"
          number: ${{ github.event.inputs.number }}
          id: deploy-preview
          message: "Deployment of a preview for this pull request was successful."
          recreate: true

Delete a comment which is no longer relevant

Take a case where you need to delete a comment which is no longer relevant. E.g., let's say we previously added a comment in a PR with id: preview-url to post a link where the changes of the pull request could be previewed. It might be useful to delete such a comment when the PR is closed to avoid users from accessing stale preview links. We can use the delete flag to achieve this.

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed]

jobs:
  cleanup-automated-comments:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    name: Delete automated PR comments
    steps:
      - name: delete comment that contains a preview link
        uses: hasura/[email protected]
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          repository: "my-org/my-repo"
          number: ${{ github.event.number }}
          id: preview-url

Contributing

Contributions are welcome 🙏 Please open an issue before working on something big or breaking.

After making changes to the source code, you will need to perform a packaging step manually by doing the following.

npm install
npm run build

git add .
git commit -m "generates dist for updated code"